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Young adults prefer the printed word

In the face of the received wisdom that the book is dead, research continues to show that younger readers — including the generation of young adult (YA) fiction readers Hollywood likes to target — haven’t heard the news. At the end of last year, the youth research company Voxburner found that 62% of 16- to 24-year-olds prefer print books to ebooks — far ahead of their desire for the material form of movies (48%) and CDs (32%). Their reasons include: “I like to hold the product” (51%); “I am not restricted to a particular device” (20%); and “I can easily share it” (10%).

According to the Childwise Monitor 2013-14, although just over half of the under-16s in the UK live in homes with a tablet computer or ereader, only one in five reads on a tablet and one in 10 uses an ereader.